Constructing Subjects at Sexual Risk in Mexico City HIV Prevention Regimes

• In Event: Latin American Entanglements of Gender, Sexuality, Race, Ethnicity, Coloniality - I

Abstract

The use of antiretroviral pharmaceuticals to prevent HIV infection started in the early 1990s in contexts of occupational exposure. Ten years later, the introduction of both Post Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP) and Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) had been extended to non-occupational situations, including cases of sexual assault, isolated injection of drugs, and consensual sexual exposure. The Treatment as Prevention Paradigm took hold in most industrialized and emergent countries. Our two-pronged approach provides an empirical case-study on the implementation of PEP and PrEP, and a problematization of assumptions and categories developed by STS as the field moves to geographies outside the USA and Western Europe, where biomedicine had its origins and is defined by high penetration levels. Drawing on feminist approaches in STS, our research explores the practices of implementation of PEP and PrEP in an HIV Public Specialized Clinique in Mexico City, the Clínica Condesa.

We make use of 10 in-depth interviews to key informants, including medical practitioners, officials in charge of prevention programs, psychologists, activists, and users, in order to analyze how these biomedical strategies have been implemented in Mexico City, a site where contrasting political orientations coexist in public spaces. Since Clínica Condesa follows international HIV protocols from WHO, UNFPA and US´CDC, we argue that subjects at sexual risk are locally configured by practices that suggest the entanglement of what we call a weak biomedicalization model, and a mix of traditional and liberal cultures where gender, social class, and sexuality-gender biases are involved in highly specific ways.

Authors

• César Torres Cruz, Laboratorio de Estudios de la Ciencia y la Tecnología, UNAM

• Edna María Suárez Díaz, Profesora-investigadora, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico.